Once the Ajanta paintings became known to the wider world after their 1819 rediscovery, the obvious concern was how fragile they were, tempera on mud plaster, exposed for centuries to moisture, smoke and the slow damage of neglect. In 1844, the East India Company commissioned Major Robert Gill, an army officer with a talent for painting, to spend years producing careful full-scale copies of the murals, intended partly as a scholarly record and partly as a hedge against the originals eventually being lost.
That precaution failed in a way nobody in 1844 could have anticipated. Gill's completed copies were shipped to London and displayed at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, and in December 1866 a fire tore through the building, destroying the vast majority of his work in a single night, an ironic loss given that the copies had been made specifically to guard against the originals themselves disappearing.
A second, more extensive copying campaign followed between 1872 and 1885, led by John Griffiths of the Bombay School of Art together with seven of his Indian students, who together produced roughly three hundred paintings over more than a decade of seasonal work at the site. Some of Griffiths' copies were also later damaged, though not as completely as Gill's. The episode as a whole left behind a curious secondary legacy: a documentary record of how the paintings appeared in the nineteenth century, itself now a historically valuable and partially damaged archive, standing alongside the original site, which, protected today as a UNESCO World Heritage property, has fared better than either of the two copying efforts made in its name.